Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: The Max Headroom Incident

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

In 1987, a very strange broadcast intrusion occurred in the city of Chicago. For just a couple of minutes, the odd TV character Max Headroom appeared onscreen in the middle of an episode of Dr. Who. He spoke in garbled tones, brandished a marital aid, and was spanked on the rear with a fly swatter by a person dressed in Annie Oakley garb. If this sounds weird, it is. It's the Max Headroom Incident.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And even better, it's a mystery that's still not fully solved today. And it's weird. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from How StuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. What do you think? Pretty good?

That's pretty good. And this is stuff you should know. Josh Headroom. Thank you. Yeah, you've been, I saw you over there with your earbuds today. You were working on this all day, weren't you? I watched Season 1, Episode 1. Oh, really?

In full? Of Max Headroom. Like, the last 10 minutes is still pending. Oh, okay. But it's crazy. Like, Max Headroom himself doesn't show up until, like, 40 minutes into the first hour-long episode. But when he does, it's dynamite. So what are we talking about?

We're talking about Max Headroom. That's right. Huge shout out at the beginning of this to vice.com, specifically motherboard. Specifically, Alex Pasternak. Yeah, who wrote the article on Motherboard. And we actually used to blog a little bit for them back in the day. I remember that? Yeah, I don't think they like to talk about that or acknowledge it publicly.

You don't think? I don't think so. Oh, I think it was mutually beneficial. I'll bet you can't find those on Motherboard anymore. I'm trying to remember. I'm sure they were like. I think I read one about driving a stick shift versus automatic or something weird.

That's a big one. Yeah. We started out with an old-fashioned recipe, I think. Yeah, that was you. They were like, let's do better than this, guys. And we said, no. And then they said, we got our own people. Yeah.

We'll let somebody come in and ghost right for you. Yeah, so that motherboard article was the basis. And from what I found, I mean, we used a lot of different sources on this, but this article entitled, The Mystery of the Creepiest Television Hack, is sort of the culmination like the coup de grace, of Max Hadrum incident articles. Yeah, it actually...

Really good job. Pastor Neck very exhaustively investigated it and turned up new information, got a new understanding of it, and basically contributed to the mythos of it himself. So way to go, Pastornak. Right. And what we're talking about is,

if you don't know who Max Hearder, at all is we're about to set that up yeah let's talk about max headroom but if you were alive during the 1980s then you probably know who max headroom is because weirdly for a brief few years it was kind of a big pop culture thing about four years by my by my calculations yeah so starting in 1984 there was a movie called max headroom colon so you know it's an important movie 20 minutes in the future. Yeah. Right?

And it was a kind of a cyberpunk movie, dystopian future, very Terry Gilliam, Brazilish. And it was, I'm not, I haven't seen that one, but it was basically where the character of Max Headroom was born, right? Yeah. And I think it actually formed the basis for the TV show later. In between the later TV show that you and I are more familiar with and that movie, Max Hadrum was a, a, pop culture sensation. He was a pitchman for New Coke. Oh, man. I went and watched an old ad. He was in an ad with Run DMC pitching New Coke, and I was like, doesn't get any more 80s than this. But it was actually a pretty cool ad, right? Was it, did it say, here's a little story, a need to tell about a new Coke

on the scene that he loved so well? That was exactly word for word how that ad went. Yeah. So, so let's back up a little more, right? Okay. Let's describe what Max Hudrum is for the kids. Because I guarantee about 80% of our audience are like, what's the 80s? What's New Coke? Yeah. Who's run DMC? Well, that's probably not true.

So what was Max Hadroom? He was billed as like the first virtual talk show host, right? Correct. Okay. Yeah. So he was played by a guy named Matt Fruer, who out of prosthetic makeup, had that look anyway, very chiseled, square-jawed. He was not bald,

but had, was he balding? Had very shortish. He had a receding hairline. Okay, but he kept it really, really short, so he kind of looked bald. Yeah, here, this will explain it to all the kids at home. He was a colleague of Murphy Brown on the Murphy Brown television show. They're like, oh, that guy, yeah. Not the painter, the other one, the love interest. I don't think I knew that. I never watched Murphy Brown, though.

Oh, man, I hope that was him. I'm pretty sure it was him. Yeah? Yeah. Well, he's been around. He's still acting today. Sure. But, yes, he played the character of Max Headroom, and the TV show Max Headroom was actually pretty far ahead of its time, tonally speaking. Yeah. So the whole premise of the TV show, his big last great gasp,

that was actually the most serious of all of it, was where in the future, TV networks controlled the world. Yeah. And the station, Network 23, that Matt Fruer's character, and later Max Headroom, who became his alter ego, worked for, were putting these things called Blipverts out. Yeah, his character's name was Edison Carter at first. Right.

And he was like an investigative journalist. Yeah. So he starts looking into these blipverts because the problem with blipverts, they are 30-second ads compressed into three seconds, and it's meant to keep you from changing the channel. The problem is that everybody watched so much TV by this time. They didn't move around, which meant that, all of the electricity generated by their nerve endings wasn't burned off, as how the show explained it.

So when their brains were assaulted with these blipverts, they kind of short-circuited, and all of that electricity that was just hanging around their bodies because they weren't moving at all during the day, made them explode. The network really liked blipverts, and they didn't want to get rid of them, so they decided to instead get rid of Edison Carter. Yeah, and the TV advertising at the time, or advertising, in general, sort of not only the TV rule the world, but the ads behind it was really the driving force. It sounds very familiar. It does.

Everyone's like, I'd take a blipvert. Sure. Give me a three-second ad on the podcast. Guys, it'll blow you up. So what ended up happening was, was the character of Edison Carter eventually was there was an incident, not the Max Headroom incident, where he was left, in a coma in an episode. The first episode. Oh, yeah, the pilot, of course.

And the last thing he sees before falling into a coma is a sign that said Max Headroom, colon, 2.3 meters. And so that's how he got the name Max Headroom. Right. It was in like a parking garage, and it was basically saying this is the overhead clearance is the way it's put in the United States. Yeah. Right. So that's the name Max Headroom, right?

But he was an AI character. Right. So the evil TV network got a hold of him, uploaded his brain, and they originally did this with the intent of bringing Edison Carter, because again, he was like their star reporter, bringing him back in virtual forms. So they created an artificial intelligence. Well, it was kind of glitchy and blippy, and it looked weird. So they threw it out. Well, some pirate broadcasters got a hold of this database that Max Hadrum lived on, and they, started broadcasting with him and Max Headroom

was born. That's right. And you said glitchy and blippy and that kids explains your intro when you went Josh. Oh yeah. Yeah. I was doing my Max Headroom in person. Thank you for explaining that. Yeah, that bears Josh was he's okay everybody.

So that's what Max Headroom did. It was jittery. It was blippy like you said. The background was this weird sort of horizontal and diagonal lined moving around thing. And that was all part of this at the time sort of futuristic look. He was also really sarcastic and really catty. And he was really, he poked fun at censorship.

And he was just kind of like a cult hero, just the character itself, right? Yeah. The awesome thing about him is in the real world of 1984, we didn't have any kind of computers that could generate a CGI host. So they actually used like prosthetics. Yeah. Like, there was a four-hour process to put Matt Fruer into the Max Headroom makeup. So it's the guy acting.

And, you know, they mess with the video a little bit, but it wasn't a CGI version of a guy. It was a guy acting like he was a CGI version of himself. Right, which is why, if, for instance, if Max Headroom, the character were to appear on, say, David Letterman, which he did, it would be Letterman interviewing a TV screen. which is what they did. But it was actually Matt Fruer in another studio. He was probably just backstage. Backstage being broadcast. And it's really like, as a kid, I did not get all this.

No, I just thought it was a... I didn't really know what it was because I'd never seen the show. I thought he was the Coke guy. Right, right. And I think I'd seen the show a little bit. I was like, this is way too grown up for me. But I think I just kind of took it on faith that he was computer-generated or something like that.

I didn't really think about it much. But now as an adult looking back, I'm like, that is brilliant and really difficult. Yeah. And the fact that they did this and pulled it off as well as they did, it's a pretty amazing thing, right? And you can kind of understand how Max Hadrum, with all that information now, became this kind of cult icon, especially among cyberpunks at the time. And what? Just keep saying cyberpunk. So let me, let me, I'm not like, uh, pretty.

particularly well versed in like what constitutes cyberpunk, but like, it's like pornography to a Supreme Court justice. Like I know it when I see it, right? Sure. So if you watch the Mex Headroom show, you're like, yeah, that's cyberpunk. Robocop is supposedly cyberpunk, right? It's like a bleak technological future where people are controlled by almost down to their minds by the government or some corporation or some amalgamation of the two. That's pretty cyber. punk right so at the time you had what are called geeks and nerds but they are not really what you would call a geek or a nerd today right somebody who wears like glasses that don't actually have prescription glass in them do people do that's some people do i did that in the fourth grade

well then you were a geek apparently no i was a prep and i wore those little tortoise shell round uh preppy glasses because that that was a cool look yeah and actually went in It's one of my least proud moments fashion-wise. Yeah. Is actually bought fake glasses and wore them around for a while. Do you have photos of those? I'd really have to dig through some boxes. I think I speak for everyone when I say start digging.

Dig. Yeah, it was not my proudest moment. Yeah, I'd like to see that picture. All right. So at the time, people who were geeks and nerds, that whole culture, was very much derided. and pushed around. I mean, look at Revenge of the Nerds, right? Yeah, exactly.

Like, they came out on top. I watched a little bit of that just the other night. This is probably the earliest celebration of nerd culture. It was not something that was like venerated or subscribed to by anyone who wasn't a genuine nerd or geek. And these were a very rarefied group of people who really knew what they were doing with computers at a time when almost no one else did. Yeah, early adopt. across the board. Very much so, right?

So Max Hadrum is kind of a cult hero to this guy. And that kind of sets up what happened on November 22, 1987, in a little town called Chicago, Illinois. The city of industry. The city of angels. The city that doesn't ever sleep. Never. The windy city. That's it.

There you go. Of all time. The windy city of all time. Yeah. Yeah. So that sets the stage. We know who the character of Max Heatheram was. Then at 9.14.

Wait, wait. Yes. Are you sure I set the stage? I think so. Did we set the stage fully here? It looks nice. All right. Let's do it.

So at 914 p.m. on that November night in Chicago. Four days before Thanksgiving. Yeah. So everyone was in that frame of mind. Right. Put yourself there. I think that that helps a lot.

It helped me at least. Sure. Okay. Football season's going on. Yeah. As a matter of fact, just that very day, the Bears had beat the Lions. Yeah, which you know it was a long time ago because the Bears won a football game. Oh, out.

I know. The people in the windy city of all time are not going to be happy with you for that. The windy city of all time. Oh, and there's a sportscaster on a local Channel 9, Dan Roan, R way in, and he was going over the highlights of that football game. Then all of a sudden, right in the middle, the broadcast signal goes, yeah,

right. It makes those noises, and then over at WGN, the control room, they were like, what's going on here? We have no idea what this is. I think the exact quote was,

a guh? What? So what happened was they eventually, what they were doing at the time was, and this is how, we're not going to go into the weeds here on how broadcast signals work. No.

But what they did, back in the day was they broadcast microwave transmissions to antennas at the top of the tallest buildings of whatever city that they were in. For local TV. For local TV, which is, I mean, there was cable at the time, but local TV still kind of ruled. Yeah. In the, well, sort of in the late 80s. Right.

Starting to segue to cable. Yeah, for sure. Cable is, you know, kind of a thing. But you, if you were a local TV station, you still have a pretty big market share, I would guess. For sure. Right. Especially WGN and Chicago. I mean, it's like Chicago Station, right?

Absolutely. So what I think you were saying is that in a studio, whatever they're recording or shooting or playing on their little videotapes, they're beaming that from the actual studio to a transmitter, say atop a very tall building, and that just kind of bounces around to other transmitters, and that's how everybody in Chicago gets their WGN signal, right? Right.

So all of a sudden, during the sportscast, it skitses out, and then all of a sudden you see a guy in a suit wearing a max headroom mask and it was there was no audio that was I guess the problem with this first intrusion it's called a broadcast intrusion yeah but you couldn't hear anything but I'm sure it was certainly distressing to a viewer to see this kind of weird thing happen especially a viewer who wanted to know what the heck happened between the bears and the lions that day. Sure. And the whole thing lasted, I think, like 11 seconds or some very short amount of time. Yeah, this was a short one. Before the WGN engineers went and switched to the backup

transmitter and I guess transmitted on a slightly different signal. Yeah. And brought the broadcast, the sports caster back on. And Dan Rohn was like, uh, if you're wondering what just happened, so am I. Right.

There's a chuckle in between. I wasn't going to do my impression of it. He should. But it's good. You should watch it. Like somebody, just go look it up. Right. So federal investigators, the FCC, that is, was called in to investigate what technically is, well, not technically.

It's a crime to do so. And then just a few minutes later, they thought, well, this is probably coming from inside the building. And so that's the first place they started looking. They said the intrusion's coming from inside the building. Exactly. They didn't find anybody, though. I mean, it was, as you'll see.

after we explained further, it would make sense that you would look in the building. Yeah. Right? For something like this. Inside job. It apparently was not an inside job,

at least as far as the WGN engineer's search was concerned, right? That's right. So that was at 914. About two hours later, I think at 1115, on another channel in Chicago, WTTW, which was the PBS station.

Yeah. They were airing an episode of Doctor Who called The Horror on Fang Island. Fang Rock. Fang Rock. The horror of Fang Rock. You have to say it like that, though.

The horror of Fang Rock. Thank you. And this is the Tom Baker Doctor. Okay. That's the only one I recognize. Oh, really? He's 70s, right? I'm no Doctor Who guy, so don't.

It looked like the 70s, what they cut in on, look pretty 70s. It didn't look 87. So who knows? I would think it would be 87. I'm guessing it was a rerun on PBS. That's what I think. think.

All right. We'll find out. Oh, man, we are going to find out, too, aren't we? Yeah, that would have been super easy to check. Yeah, at any rate, in the middle of this Doctor Who episode, it suddenly cuts out again. And now you've got what appears to be the full run of this maxedrum intrusion. Yes. Instead of 30 seconds, this one was a minute and 22 seconds.

And right now, I would say, if you are someone. where you can pause and go to a online video carrier of your choosing and type in Max Headroom Incident. Spend the next minute and 22 seconds watching it. We'll wait. And we'll wait. We'll just insert a minute and 22 seconds of silence here. How about this? Let's take a break.

Oh, okay. And then we'll come back and then we'll talk about exactly what happened during that minute and 22 seconds. Okay. is having a moment. New name, new album, exclusive shows. So IHart Radio is sending you to experience it all. Life at the Hollywood Pole. Lights, hotel, tickets, and $1,000 cash.

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Shortly before 6 o'clock a.m. on November 13th, 1991, Annette's mother and her two young sons found her unresponsive inside their apartment. Investigators ruled the case a homicide. Over the years, detectives continued searching for answers, but the case eventually went cold. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a True Crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told and to the questions that still remain. As the years passed, detectives continued working the case, but more than three decades after Annette's death,

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Oh, okay. I was looking at you. I'm guessing that people, people did watch it. A few people did. Smart ones did because this is really tough to describe and we're going to try, but it's something you really have to see yourself. Yeah, and here. It's genuinely disturbing. sitting in an office years later watching it.

And I can imagine if I was at home, I would have probably been a little freaked out. You found it disturbing? Yeah. I found it hilarious in like a really juvenile way. Yeah, it creeps me out. It was like watching David Byrne on acid at a talking head show. That's what I think of when I saw that.

You know? All right, so let's describe the scene here. Okay. So you got Mac's headroom. Well, actually a dude wearing. wearing a rubber mask. A rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom. Yes.

And this is just genius to me. So you mentioned earlier about how the Max Headroom had like these kind of grid lines behind them at all times and they kind of moved and adjusted and they were different colors. To do to simulate that, these guys had like a piece of corrugated metal, shiny metal. Yeah. And I guess they had it attached somehow to something that rocked it back and forth. and they kind of, somebody was clearly rocking it back and forth here or there erratically, and it really does a good job.

It gets the point across. That it looked like the Maxodrome TV show. Yeah, the background. And the character. Yes. Yeah. But again, I would say that this person was very, very clearly on acid. Well, I think what disturbs me, I need to make it clear, it is definitely funny and stupid.

But what disturbs me is the sound of the voice, which is all garbled. this really like on YouTube it has subtitles thankfully because it's hard to make out and a lot of times it just says you know understand what he's saying or whatever uh and the garble quality and just the random weirdness that's going on it's not like it was creepier to me than if v for vendetta dude had a come on guy fox had to come on and said you know we are coming into your thing to tell you this about this right this was just so weird and all over the place it was creepy to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.

Like you're watching somebody's nonsensical. Somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah, I felt like watching somebody lose their mind. Right, okay. Yeah. Totally get that. And here's what the guy did

that would make you feel like he lost his mind. This is the weird thing to me. It's very targeted toward WGN, right? Almost so much so that some people would say, this was clearly somebody who had a grudge against WGN. He makes fun of the Bulls sportscaster, the guy who worked for WGN at the time. He makes reference to how he just made a masterpiece

for the greatest world's newspaper nerds, which was a messed up version of WGN's call letters stand for World's Greatest Newspaper. He wields a rubber penis. Yeah, that's one. Although it was great. In almost every article it was referred to as a marital aid.

Did you see that? No, but I actually guessed it on Strickland's tech stuff like four years ago, and we covered this, and I called it a marital aid. Did you? Okay, so there you go. I wanted to keep it clean. Sure. But then I realized that saying the word penis is okay.

Well, it's clinical. I mean, we did a puberty episode. Surely we have the chops to say penis. But marital aid is hilarious, especially in this context, like this crazy dude on acid. wearing a Max Hedroom mask has a marital aid? No, he doesn't. That's not what that is in that context, you know? Yeah, and that's a new T-shirt, by the way.

What? We have the chops to say penis. That's a band name. Let's go ahead and use some of the, let's go ahead and say some of the direct quotes. Yes, so he comes on and he goes, he's a freaking nerd. I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky,

freaking liberal. That's a really good impression of it. And Chuck Swirsky was the The Bulls guy Yeah the sports announcer And this is a time too When like the Bulls were This is the Jordan Pippin era still

I mean well still It was at the beginning of it Was it 87? I thought it was like in the middle of it Was it the beginning? Pretty earlyish let's say I wish these days That I would have been

More cognizant And like more into basketball Like I am now See that's when I was the most into it was Bird, Jordan, Magic. I would like to watch some of those games. Yeah, that was good stuff. Because that's when the Hawks were good back then.

Yeah, back then. Dominique. Hey, shout out to Kent Baysmore. You know, he listens to this show. No way. Yeah, he's a fan. How'd you find that out? Twitter?

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Man, I love Bays. I know. How do you not love Bays? He's awesome. Man, he's bright red right now.

That's so cool. All right, so Chuck Swirsky's freaking liberal. He's wielding the rubber penis. The marital aid. The marital aid, he drops that. Then he picks up a new Coke. Well, you can't really tell if it's a new Coke. Oh, was it?

Uh-huh. Okay, I couldn't really tell. He picks up a can, but he says, Catch the Wave, which is the New Coke slogan. Right. Then he starts humming, it's so random. Then he starts humming the theme song to the 60s show, Clutch Cargo, which is weird in and of itself.

Sure, that's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths, it was just a, like, a human. mouth moving. That's disturbing. Yeah, that was, if you've seen Pulp Fiction, it was the scene where Bruce Willis was a kid and Christopher Walken comes in with the wristwatch scene that Clutch Cargo was playing

on TV when he's watching it. Right. But it is weird looking. Right. So you would say, why did you do the Clutch Cargo theme? Well, again, this is a WGN thing and apparently that's where you saw it as you as a kid, yeah, in Chicago. Okay, so he says also,

your love is fading. I still see the X, which apparently is something from the last episode of Clutch Cargo. Yeah, that was the big X or something. And then he says, what you were talking about earlier, I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds.

But he should have said world's greatest newspaper nerds. WGN. Right. Which you might find confusing as I did, too. But apparently the Chicago Tribune Company owns WGN. TV. So they call themselves

World's Greatest Newspaper TV. Right. WGN. It's all coming together. Ipso facto. There you go. Then, finally, toward the end, the camera cuts to a different angle. This one has the dude bent over with his bare butt hanging out.

His face is now off screen, but he's holding the mask still out like his head is in it, but it's not. Right. And there is a person, I say woman, but I don't know, but a person in like an Annie Oakley dress. Is that what it was?

I didn't get that. Yeah, it looked like a prairie bonnet ensemble, but the bonnet kind of hides the face, so you don't know if it's a man or a woman. Okay. And they are spanking the bare butt with a fly swatter. Right. And he's worried about them coming to get him.

They're coming to get me! And then he says, come get me and uses a bad word. B word. The B word. And then it goes back to Doctor Who. Yeah. Yeah, just like it came in, went out. It just, and it's like gone.

Can you imagine seeing that live? And that, well, the people who saw it live, the next thing they would have heard was the doctor saying something like, oh, he died of an electric shock, must have died instantly. Yeah. And everybody's just sitting there with your mouths hanging open. Well, it was Dr. Hu, too.

So it was probably a bunch of Chicago nerds watching PBS. Yeah. So, all right, my imitation was okay, but let's just play at least like a couple of lines from the real thing. Yeah. All right. So you did a pretty good impression. I think everyone can agree now, right?

It's so strange. So this was an enormous thing, right? Like people were watching this and were aghast, a gog. Some people probably thought it was funny. WGN's reporting on it all over the place the next couple of days. Yeah, the newspapers had picked it up. Yeah. There's this one, there's a compilation of WGM broadcasts, or it may even be more than just WGN, of people in the street being interviewed. What do you think about this? One guy's like, it's kind of like Kooligans, throwing a brick through your window, you know, to get your attention. There's a little kid who's like, very, very, very,

funny. The star of the news, though, was this one Doctor Who fan, this lady who was not at all amused by this. And I just want to play her little segment, okay? Yeah. It annoyed some viewers. I don't know. I just thought it would be just a slight mess up,

but that in the middle of the tapes, it's going to be you're going to have to tape over it. I just think that's the funniest thing out of the whole thing. Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV. He was so angry. Yeah, I didn't see that guy. I saw that in the Pasternak article. So funny.

Yeah, he was mad. So there was a lot of mixed reaction, but the voice from on high that came from the FCC, who you said were called in pretty quickly. Yeah. They were like, this is no laughing matter. You might think it's funny, it's not very funny. Okay, it's kind of funny, but not really. And you can get a $100,000 fine and a year in jail for this kind of thing.

So stop doing it. But at this point, by this point, it was actually a federal offense. It was a felony. A felony offense. Wait, what was that? Dazed and confused. Oh, okay. Tampering with the mailbox is a felony offense.

I was like, wait a minute. I know that from somewhere. So the FCC gets involved in this, this is really interesting in this article. The FBI got involved too. FBI was involved, Chicago PD. Like, they were looking into it. Apparently the, man, it has become obvious to me that I say the word apparently a lot. Really?

A lot. I was listening to an episode queuing an episode and I was like, stop saying apparently, Josh. Yeah, I've started to, after 10 years, I've started to notice some things about my own self. It's like a tick. I try to just avoid it. I try to too, and normally I can,

but man, it just came welling up into my awareness. Well, apparently. Apparently, I'm going to have to get over it. At any rate, there were a lot of different agencies working on this, but the trail went cold pretty quick. And you remember how you said that the WGN engineers started looking around the station? Yeah. I think what they were looking for was this.

Somebody physically patching in to the transmission network, the cables. Waring a maxedron mask. And yeah, either playing a videotape, which it seems pretty obvious. It was pre-taped, yeah. It was pre-taped. Or doing something like in a studio. But they would have to physically patch into WGN's transatlash. transmission network.

Yeah, it's like when a car doesn't work, and I open the hood thinking I'm going to see a squirrel gnawing on a cable that's in two pieces now. Right. And frayed at the ends. Right. Now, imagine that squirrel wearing a max headroom mask and being on acid, okay, with a marital aid. Yes. So, and at first, the FCC and the FBI, and anybody who was in the know, basically said this

was a very sophisticated attack, it would have required a very, very, some very expensive equipment. Yeah. A lot of electricity. There's not a lot of ways that they could have done this. But later on in the Pasternak article, and this is one of the ways Pasternak contributed to this whole thing, he talked to one of the FCC investigators. And this guy basically did away with that whole viewpoint that had lasted for almost 30 years. that it had to have been somebody with $100,000 piece of equipment and, you know, $10,000 worth of electricity over the minute and a half.

He was saying, no, you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this new for $10,000 at the time. Yeah. Or you could have probably bought it for use for just a fraction of that. And it would have taken very little electricity. It would have just taken some know-how and good positioning, really. Yeah, basically, he was like, it could have been done with, like, the size of a direct TV dish today. Right. And all they would have had to do was get in a high enough location in between, like, literally, because they're beaming waves.

They're beaming microwaves through the air. So he's like, all they had to do is get in between the original studio and that initial tower on top of the, I think it was John Hancock building. For WGN, yeah. Yeah, and have a stronger signal. Right. So even just like a slightly stronger signal. Yeah. So you remember how WGN has their studio transmission shooting up to the John Hancock building? Yep.

And then that transmitter shoots it out to everybody else in Chicago. Yeah. What I think you're saying is like if somebody was on the roof of another nearby building. Yes. And they just shoot a transmission, their own max headroom transmission at a stronger, a stronger weight or no, a stronger. amplitude, that's what it is, of the same frequency, you just overpower it, cancels out what WGN's doing, and instead it transmits your max headroom thing. And they would be closer to that broadcast tower.

Right. Ostensibly. Yes. So that would mean that it required far less electricity than you would think or that they originally thought and far less equipment too. They also had a pretty good idea of where these people would have had to have done it because they, after they got shut out of WGM, they turned their attention to WTTW, the PBS station, and they hijack their signal. Well, WTTW shot their studio link to the Sears Tower.

Yes. So this would have been somebody who was on a roof somewhere that had a clear view of the John Hancock building and the Sears Tower and could transmit to either one of them. But that's basically what they think happened. Yeah, and the guy you were talking about Dr. Michael Marcus, who at the time was the assistant bureau chief in the FCC's Field Operations Bureau, he was a lead investigator and he said that the guy in Chicago that was sort of in charge wasn't super like, he was just sort of used to traditional FCC investigations. He wasn't one to go knocking on doors and as to like investigate some kind of weird kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes. who may or may not have a marital aid in his apartment. Just smack him on that. And then they also, you know, nobody was being hurt.

No one got hurt. In the end, it was almost a victimless crime. So they didn't throw a ton of resources at it. They were kind of like, listen, we're not going to, if you want to go investigate this, that's great. You should. But we're not going to assign a team of 12 people to try and crack this case of a bunch of a bunch of nerds who did a weird thing for a minute and 20 seconds. And I think the longer it went on and there was no more of these intrusions from these guys,

the fewer and fewer resources they had to work with. And it just kind of fell to the wayside. Well, what's interesting is in the beginning they said it would take somebody with a very expensive piece of equipment, a lot of electricity, and a lot of know-how. And today, the only one of those that's remaining is a lot of know-how. There wouldn't have been a lot of people running around Chicago who would have known how to do something like this. So it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources, that no one has ever been really implicated in this one. Yeah, I don't think we've said.

They still don't know who did this. It's an unsolved mystery. Yeah. Like Dennis Farina and Robert Stack love this one. the FBI for their take started concentrating on the actual video. They had the technology at the time, which is kind of funny now to think about it. But they're the only ones who had the technology at the time to actually make enhance frames of this videotape and print out, you know, pictures, enhance them.

And they were kind of focused on this upper right-hand quadrant, as they say, where the Annie Oakley was spanking with a fly swatter. I don't know why they're so into that. But they said, you know, we're trying to get clues on the actual location of the people who made the tape. Not necessarily where they broadcast it from, but where did they shoot this thing to begin with. There was very little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal. And that could have been literally anywhere because it's a really tight shot. It really is.

Yeah. And there was very little evidence given in the video. Yeah, I mean, it says that they were looking at industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in an apartment living room. I mean, it wasn't like the door was attached to anything. It was freely spinning back and forth. It didn't make sense. Not the best lead, right?

No. So over time, and again, this is weird too. It's not so weird that the FCC or the FBI didn't find who did this if they weren't really looking very hard. Yeah. What was really weird is that no one has been like, it was these guys. I was there. I know these dudes.

It was these guys. Statute limitations. done, like, who cares? Yeah, after 1993, these guys would have gotten off Scott-free because the statute of limitations for this one was five years, right? I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me. Right. I'm soy bomb.

No one's done that, right? Yeah. There was some very early forum, like message board stuff took the form of bulletin board services, I think. Yeah. BBSs. Really early geek culture. like Matthew Broderick dialing something with his phone and then putting it on that weird little, you know, Commodore 64 thing,

the modem, yeah, to like transmit the dial tone over the telephone system. Right. So that's what, that's like the level of technology that these people were dealing with. But they were communicating with each other over like this proto-internet, these bulletin board systems. And two days after this, a guy named the Chameleon posted, basically what you and I said about how all it took was these guys to go up on a tall building and overwhelm the WGN and the WTTW Studio Links.

And ipso facto, I'm a big fan of that, by the way, this intrusion was successful, right? Yeah. Two days, not two years, not a year ago, two days after it, somebody was on there explaining how it went down. So somebody knew this, right? But only two theories have really ever come to light as to who it was. One, you can basically just throw right out. And the other one, it turns out to have been a dead end. Yeah, the first one that you were talking about that doesn't really hold water was a,

and this was a rumor online for a while. It was a musician named Eric Fournier or Fornier. Fernier. Fornier? I had a friend in preschool, I think, named Fernier, yeah. That's how it was spelled? F-O-U-R N-I-E-R

Actually, I don't know how it's spelled I couldn't spell back then So this guy was in a band and he did this weird super creepy

YouTube series called Shee S-H-A-J-Y-E Did you watch it? Oh yeah Love it Yeah just I knew that you would love it

Right up your alley Yeah But this is genuinely unsettling too I'm with you on that So it kind of fit in that he was doing these weird things. He had this band. They were in Bloomington, Indiana, not too far from Chicago.

The Blood Farmers. Yeah, the band was the Blood Farmers. And they did these weird music videos. And they thought, this is the kind of guy that would have done that. And the thinking was that he went to go broadcast one of their weird music videos as a broadcast intrusion. But chickened out at the last minute because they would have been found. Sure. And then ended up just improvving.

That part makes a little sense because it definitely seems. Improved. It does, but it was also videotaped, remember? So that means he would have had two videotapes with him. What do you mean? So if he was going to play the music video and said, I'm not going to do that. He would have had to have brought this other videotape and played that as a backup.

The other thing is apparently his friend, see, I just said apparently again, Alex Pasternak from Motherboard contacted some of Fernier's friends. Yeah. Because Fernier died in 2010, but his friends are like absolutely not. Not. Even some of the blood farmers are like, it wasn't him. Yeah. Like, I know what you're saying. And yeah, he did the whole Shea St. John thing.

Yeah. But this was not him. It was not quite there. He didn't know what he was doing with any broadcast stuff or video editing or anything like that. Yeah. So this other one to me seems pretty promising. So we flash forward to, when did this actually happen?

Was this like by the time Reddit to come around? Wouldn't it on Reddit? Yeah, I think it was about. 25 years after. So it would have been in 2007. Yeah, so there's this guy from 2012, 13. Okay. Sorry. There was this guy from Chicago named Bowie, uh, POG. I didn't have any friends with that last name. Right. When I was a kid. And he was one of the kids hanging around those BBSs in the 80s in Chicago. From the sounds of it, he was on the younger side. He was 13. And even as a 13-year-old, girl geek was very much intimidated by the older geeks in that crowd. And so it wasn't boisterous.

He was sort of like, hey, I'm kind of hanging out here and not saying much and don't notice me. I just want to ingratiate myself. And you guys can give me drunk for laughs if you want. And at a party in 1987, he remembers this, he described him as a small peculiar man that he thought was about in his 30s. And he had an older brother. They lived in Chicago. So Pogue is describing these two guys who were in the same scene with him. Correct. Right. Yeah.

And he had, they lived with his girlfriend, downtown, or about 10 miles from downtown Chicago. And they had the know-how. They were super into computers early on. He said, you went to their apartment, and it was just like,

it looked like a computer hoarder, mess of wires and computers and equipment. Like Neo's apartment. Yeah. Why not? Or, what was the other one he was in? Before the Matrix.

Johnny Neumonic? Yes. Yeah. Bill and Ted? Yeah. Johnny Neumonic, that's cyberpunk. Yes. Right?

Yes, it is. All right. You could probably make the case that the Matrix is as well. All right. Sure. So he described him as a stocky guy with tinted lens glasses in his early 30s, an odd dude. His brother, he said he described as just kind of normal. But he said that he didn't make the connection at the time,

but at a party on November about the same day, midday, on November 22nd. He was at a gathering of these dudes at the brother's apartment, and he heard them say something about doing something big. Later that night, they went to Pizza Hut, and he's like, what are you guys talking about? What's the big thing? And they said, hey, don't ask questions, but just watch Channel 11 tonight. Right. On that same day, and I don't know how he didn't put it together.

That's the one thing that really strikes me is fishy. But he said that years later, now when he looks at it, he's like, even with that mask on, I see the body, I see what's going on, I hear that, and it's that guy. Right. To me. But 25 years later, he was there that day. They tell him to watch that night, and he didn't put it together for 25 years. That, to me, is the one fishy thing. Well, and he has been called out as fishy.

Sure. I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy. Yeah, so the guy, the motherboard, Pastorneck, reached out and he said, can you still get in touch with these guys all these years later? He said he sent them messages via Facebook. I don't even know if they saw them. They didn't get back. Then in a last ditch effort, he sent them a certified mail to, he found out where they lived, never heard anything back. And he was like, hey, it's clear that these guys don't want to be talked to.

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He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and I said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded a bow! And that's exactly what made us all think. He had something to do with it.

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or wherever you get your podcast. So that's where it stands right now. Like nobody knows who is behind it still to this day. Crazy. It is crazy. And as a result, this Max Headroom hack has taken its place and like the pantheon of geek culture and of hacker culture, and rightfully so, you know?

Oh, yeah. It's legendary in its own way. That's right. You got anything else? I got nothing else on this one. Cool, man. Well, if you want to know more about Max Hadroom, you should start by checking out this amazing motherboard article by Alex Pasternak.

And since I said, Amazing, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to go with the Alman Brothers Eat a Peach from emojis. I don't know if this is true, but it's fun. Okay. I wanted to talk about when Josh talked about the Alman Brothers band Factoid, because I think it's actually a cool factoid. Dwayne Allman was once asked by a reporter what he was going to do for the war effort in Vietnam,

and his response was, I'm going to eat a peach for peace. Dwayne died not long after that album, and Eda Peach was released posthumous. so he contends Jesse Gaudet that that is where the album title came from and that Eat a Peach was not Eat a butt

He or she I guess Jesse could go either way Yeah as always keep up the good work I'm currently brewing beer and listening Tell me where to mail some bottles Okay Or come pick them up in Salt Lake City All right

We'll do both Sounds like a challenge Right They're too heavy You can't pick them up Thanks a lot Jesse appreciate that, even though I still think I'm right. If you want to contend that something one of us said is incorrect, we love that stuff.

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